As Libya Buries Victims, Hints of Deception

A crowd of about 500 gathered Saturday to bury nine people killed in a NATO airstrike. The Libyan government said the dead were imams, but some of the mourners suggested otherwise.

By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT

TRIPOLI, Libya — As the nine pinewood coffins were laid on scrubland beside the glistening blue waters of the Mediterranean, uniformed men with Kalashnikov rifles fired volley after volley into an azure sky, and a trumpeter blew the discordant melancholy of a final farewell.

Then, in minutes, the few hundred mourners who had gathered in this city melted away into a perfect spring day, ending another funeral — this time for the victims of a Friday bombing in the eastern oil town of Brega — that had been transformed into a pageant for denouncing the NATO forces whose bombs are taking a regular toll in Libyan lives.

For the officials who shepherd the small band of foreign journalists covering the war from here to such events, seeing them as powerful propaganda tools to be used against the Western powers, the burials on Saturday provided a moment that even the most accomplished propagandists could not have written into their script.

Just before the coffins arrived, two high-flying aircraft — NATO planes, for sure, since others are banned under a United Nations-imposed no-fly zone — wrote vapor trails high above.

(More here.)